The Remarketer

At lunch yesterday, I was amazed to find out that the two co-workers joining me hadn’t yet realized that daylight savings time goes into effect this coming weekend. Of course, they aren’t responsible for any of our company’s or clients’ IT hardware or computer systems. Otherwise they most certainly would have been aware that Daylight Savings Time is starting a month earlier this year due to new US regulations.

Just in case any IT admins out there have gotten (way) behind on their DST07 updates, here is a summary of where you can find help for various manufacturers:

This month Google released their compiled data on hard drive performance from their datacenters around the world. When you’re Google, this type of study is far beyond the anecdotal reports that can be found on gear forums like “I picked up these piece of $&@# Drives from (xyz low-end drive manufacturer) and one already crapped out!”

Instead, Google basically posted “We’ve got these datacenters all over the world with over 100,000 cheap SATA and PATA drives between them and a bunch crapped out!”, oh yeah and here is some great insight into the circumstances under which this occurred. Over 5 years, they recorded every failure and many variables and then repurposed it into an independent report unprecedented in size.

When I first heard that Sun’s Datacenter in a Box was slated to go on a tour of the USA, the first thing that came to mind was naturally the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile. Sun shouldn’t take this as a slight though, I think it’s a brilliant move, and I tip my hat to them as a competitor (we sell used Sun servers). Anyhow, in looking into this, I discovered there is a whole world of these product themed cars.

Here is our List of 11 Traveling Product-mobiles, starting with the legend.

1) Oscar Meyer’s Wienermobile
(The Grand-Daddy of product-mobiles)

In commemoration of this President’s Day, we’ve decided to take a look back at the last four US presidencies and their policies on technology, as well as their personal use of it.

Looking back at Campaign ‘92

Presidential candidates have made a lot of noise this year adopting new technology to announce and promote their campaigns. Democratic candidates have stepped out first with Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama announcing their presidential runs via online video, and Republican candidates won’t be far behind. Some believe whomever can adapt to new communication methods (ala Kennedy over Nixon in 1960) will seize the presidency. But new communication was also coming to light as early as 1992.

I don’t know if I would expect any less from the people behind NetworkWorld Magazine, but the material that is regularly turned out at NetworkWorld.com’s blogs is engaging, interesting, topical and funny. I’ve been converted to a daily reader.

NetworkWorld.com Community
- A rolling update of the latest blogs by their staff, plus occasional entries by site users

NetworkWorld Blogs
- A list of their 11 networking and enterprise IT blogs with current posts (podcasts too)

Here are a couple of recent highlights from NW:

Enough with the alerts already
- “What is up with all these Cisco security alerts lately?”

From our experience running booths at college and university job fairs, there is a simple sure-fire way to attract and recruit IT and IS students to your booth.

Include the word “technologies” or “technology” in your company name or in big wording on your display materials.

The funny thing is, Vibrant generally doesn’t go to college career fairs to recruit IS graduates, because we require several years experience in the field before we consider a systems engineer candidate (we’re looking for entry-level sales and customer service).

This week the blog is six months old and today happens to be my seventh anniversary working at Vibrant. To commemorate these milestones, I offer up the following roundup post. Okay, I admit it. This is actually just an excuse to put up a quick post while we work on getting some solid blog posts rolling again.

I enjoy getting a look in at client’s datacenters and operations. It’s almost always impressive to see a large corporations massive and intricately organized server farm or warehouse system. Here are some sneak peeks that have surfaced on the web recently:

After a sabbatical that has lasted far too long, we’re back! Last month my wife and I welcomed our first baby into the world, so I took some time off from contributing to the blog.

Anyhow, I bet you’re wondering what Hockey Pucks and Global IT Business have to do with one another…

Well, we chose to give Hockey Pucks as our Holiday gift to our international clients for 2006. Vibrant has clients throughout the world from South America and Europe to Asia and Australia.
Minnesota is known as the “State of Hockey,” and we thought it would be a fun representation of our headquarters here where the lakes are covered with ice and the ice is covered with skate marks.

To the winners of the 2006 SysAdmin of the Year award, Congratulations!

In the immortal words of Strongbad:

“Now that’s what I’m talking about, that was amazing! I mean.. you… I mean … I’m buying you a pizza!”

- As told to The Cheat after he created the Everybody to the Limit / Fhqwhgads video.

So if any of the winners, runners-up and honorable mention sysadmins are interested, contact us with your favorite local pizza joint and address and we’ll send you a gift certificate. Hopefully your employers reward you with some real bonuses though (see cash/money).

A few weeks ago, Corey wrote about the top “Ten Servers that Changed the World.” In reaction, I decided to make my own list… The Ten Servers that Changed the Fictional World.

There are two guidelines for this list. One, they must exist only in the world of movies or TV. Second, they need to fit the following definition: A server is a computer system that provides services or data to other computing systems - called clients - over a network or other communication device.

With that said, here they are. In no particular order…

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